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Introduction
This book owes its origins to an event that occurred in Vienna in the
summer of 1983, when lines of schoolchildren wound their way through
the sidewalks of the Austrian capital. The attraction they were lining
up for was not a Disney movie or a theme park, but instead a museum
exhibition,
one of many celebrations held that year to commemorate the
300th anniversary of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna. In the minds
of these children, their teachers, and the Austrian (and, for that matter,
the general European) public, 1683 was a year in which they all were
saved – from conquest by the alien Ottoman state, the “unspeakable
Turk.” The Ottoman state had emerged, c.
1300, in western Asia Minor, not far from the modern city of Istanbul. In a steady process of territorial accretion, this state had expanded both west and east, defeating Byzantine,
Serb, and Bulgarian kingdoms as well as Turkish nomadic principalities
in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the Mamluk sultanate based in Egypt. By
the seventeenth century it held vast lands in west Asia, North Africa, and
southeast Europe. In 1529 and again in 1683, Ottoman armies pressed
to conquer Habsburg Vienna.
The artifacts in the Vienna museum exhibit told much about the nature
of the 1683 events. For example, the display of the captured tent and personal effects of the Ottoman grand vizier illustrated the panicky flight of
the Ottoman forces from their camps that, just days before, had encircled
Vienna. The timely arrival of the central and east European allies,
notably King John ( Jan) Sobieski of Poland, had put the encircling Ottoman
armies to flight and turned the second Ottoman effort to seize the city
into a full-blown disaster. For hundreds of years the Ottoman forces
had been pressing northward, ever deeper into the Balkan peninsula and
closer to Vienna and the German-speaking lands. These Ottomans literally were the terror of their enemies, seemingly invincible. Viennese
mothers put their children to bed warning them to behave lest the “Turks”
come and gobble them up. This world changed in 1683. Somewhat to
the surprise of both sets of protagonists, the Ottoman forces besieging
Vienna were catastrophically defeated, an event that marked the permanent reversal of power relations between the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires.
By “Turks,” these frightened mothers meant a more complex reality –
the fighting forces, who may or may not have been ethnically Turkish,
of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman empire. Thus, a word here
about the terms “Turks” and “Ottomans” seems in order. West, central,
and east Europeans referred to the “Turkish empire” and to the “Turks”
when discussing the state led by the Ottoman dynasty.
This was as true in the fourteenth as in the twentieth century. The appellation “Turk” has
some basis since the Ottoman family was ethnically Turkish in its origins,
as were some of its supporters and subjects. But, as we shall see, the dynasty immediately lost this “Turkish” quality through intermarriage with
many different ethnicities. As for a “Turkish empire,” state power relied
on a similarly heterogeneous mix of peoples. The Ottoman empire succeeded because it incorporated the energies of the vastly varied peoples it
encountered, quickly transcending its roots in the Turkish nomadic migrations from central Asia into the Middle East (see chapter 2).
Whatever ethnic meaning the word “Turk” may have held soon was lost and the
term came to mean “Muslim.” To turn Turk meant converting to Islam.
Throughout this work, the term Ottoman is preferred since it conjures
up more accurate images of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious enterprise that
relied on inclusion for its success.
In hindsight, we can see that after 1683 the Ottomans never again
threatened central Europe. They did, however, stay in occupation of
southeast Europe for 200 more years, dominating the modern-day states
of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, and others. Finally, in the hardly
unbiased words of the British politician, Gladstone, they were driven “bag
and baggage” from their possessions.
In its Asian and African provinces, the Ottoman Empire persisted even longer. Most parts of modern-day
Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia
remained part of the empire until World War I. During the last decades
before it disappeared in 1922 the Ottoman Empire existed without the
European provinces that for centuries had been its heart and soul. In its
last days, but only then, it fairly could be called an Asiatic, Middle Eastern power.
Until the 1878 Treaty of Berlin stripped away all but fragments
of its Balkan holdings, the Ottoman Empire was a European power and
was seen as such by its contemporaries, being deeply involved in European military and political affairs. Throughout nearly all of its 600-year history, the Ottoman state was as much a part of the European political
order as were its French or Habsburg rivals.
